She
sums it up simply: She’s trying to give something back to
the educational system that gave her so much. That’s why opera
star Regina Resnik was in Albany on April 30 to speak with
members of the state Legislature about the need for continued
support of music-related educational programs—and to win funding
for a scholarship-based program that will allow talented but
cash-strapped singers to study at her alma mater, the City
University of New York.

“I
am a product of the New York City public school system,” Resnik
explained at a press conference last week, “born in New York
City, a beneficiary of the time when the city’s school system—and
the New York State school system—were among the highest-regarded
in the world.

“And
I benefited from the education that I could get tuition-free.”
She described a school system that not only covered a far
broader ranger of subjects than you’ll find today, but that
also was very much involved with the city’s cultural institutions.

“When
I was 12, I sang my first performance on stage,” she said,
“in an original musical play called Gypsy Love—which
forecast my future of gypsy parts.” In fact, she has sung
the title role of the gypsy in Carmen more than 500
times as part of a career that lasted more than 50 years and
included more than 80 roles. She’s the only singer in history
who, after 13 years as a leading dramatic soprano, began a
second career as a mezzo-soprano. She worked with all the
great conductors of the 20th century, and went on to win a
Tony Award nomination in 1987 when she went to Broadway for
Cabaret.

An articulate and impassioned woman who believes that music—and
all of the arts—are vital to any sense of civilization, she
laments the current educational system’s ignorance of cultural
activity, which she sees in sharp contrast to her own upbringing.
“I went to an incredible high school that not only had a band,
an orchestra and a Gilbert and Sullivan Society—and frequent
concerts—but which also produced the kinds of students who
would be called upon to go to the student performances at
the Metropolitan Opera and participate in anything that had
young people in it.

“This
is not to decry the fact that music departments work as best
as they can with the available teachers. It’s that the entire
component of the school system that used to participate in
the cultural life of the city does not really exist the way
it used to, because we do not have music and art education
any more in the lower schools. And unless you elect those
courses in higher education, you haven’t learned anything.”

To her master classes in the CUNY system she hopes to add
similar sessions in the SUNY system, including the University
at Albany. She also continues to devise new directions for
Regina Resnik Presents, a program of narrated music and history
that debuted in 1997 with a program titled The Gypsy in Classical
Song, and which opens tomorrow (Friday) at its newest venue,
the CUNY graduate center.

Other programs in the series are Beethoven in Song, which
debuted at Hunter College in 1999, and The Classic Kurt Weill,
featured in the 2000-2001 season. She is preparing two more
programs for future seasons: Colors of the Diaspora, a three-evening
series that traces the cross-fertilization of Jewish music
with a variety of European hosts, and Two Evenings With the
Garcias, saluting the 19th century’s royal family of singing,
a family that spanned Mozart’s time to the early 1900s and
produced the most famous interpreters of the classical and
romantic eras.

“The
higher-education system has the wherewithal to present interesting
programs, and to come into the cultural world again with something
that is interesting,” said Resnik, who sees her current mission
as “an advocate for the cultural aspect of higher education,
and to present this program which would be interesting and
unique”—and, it’s easy to add, more needed than ever.

—B.A.
Nilsson

Naked
in Albany, New York

It’s
Saturday morning, April 26, at Capital Repertory Theatre’s
Orange Street rehearsal space—exactly one month after the
New York City auditions, four weeks after callbacks and casting
of the two-actor play The Blue Room, and 11 days after
the “first hour” meeting with cast, crew and box-office staff
to discuss what is, by consensus, Capital Rep’s most daring
production to date. The 10th rehearsal for The Blue Room,
David Hare’s sexy (and loose) adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s
La Ronde—a sensation featuring Nicole Kidman nude when
it premiered five years ago in London—will soon begin. Thirteen
rehearsals remain before opening.

Actress Amy Landecker is here first, already chatting on a
cell phone in one of the rooms off right from the rehearsal
space. You hear her before you see her, and you see her eyes
long before you notice anything else about Landecker—and she
has plenty to notice. Dan Cordle, the male actor, arrives
a heartbeat after the 10 AM call, a collection of thin limbs
moving, carrying a faded green canvas guitar case, and a sack.

“Is
the birthday girl here yet?” he asks, and as if just waiting
for her cue, Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill arrives. With Mancinelli-Cahill
here, things begin to move: Set pieces get set, beds are moved,
blankets and sheets are brought out, as if several house guests
have dropped in.

After a few echoes of “Happy birthday Maggie”—no one feigns
not knowing it’s the birthday of Capital Rep’s artistic director,
who also is directing The Blue Room—Mancinelli-Cahill
begins, sotto voce, with the two actors on the bed placed
in the center of the red-tape oval. A few laughs from Cordle
and Landecker, and the director’s power manifests itself:
Mancinelli-Cahill can literally charm the pants off of anyone.
Landecker and Cordle drop skirt and trousers. Mancinelli-Cahill
says “and the lights go black, they’re naked when the play
starts,” and the two actors find comfortably entwined positions
(“I don’t want a knee in the nuts,” says Landecker), wrapped
in a sheet for the first of what turns out to be six simulated
sex acts over the next three hours of rehearsal.

Though initially reluctant to talk about her ideas about The
Blue Room before it opens—“I’ve talked pre-opening about
ideas to explore in a play with critics in the past, and then
they wrote that I didn’t do it in the play, as if the rehearsal
process were static and things don’t change; that’s the meaning
of the word ‘explore’,” she explains warily—let alone have
an outsider sit in on an early rehearsal, Mancinelli-Cahill
agrees due to the extraordinary nature of The Blue Room.

“This
is our first R-rated production. Children definitely will
not be admitted. If you have a ‘mature’ 12-year-old, forget
it,” she stated emphatically to questions from the box office
staff during first hour. Though repeatedly stating during
preproduction that “The Blue Room isn’t about sex,”
sex comes up often in Mancinelli-Cahill’s subsequent conversations
and directions of a play about the “daisy chain” copulations
of 10 couples, all played by Landecker and Cordle.

“It’s
a thoughtful look at human relationships, very human, very
humorous,” Mancinelli-Cahill explained during first hour.
During this 10th rehearsal, she focuses on “finding physical
centers: I want a map in place by the end of rehearsal today.”
Mancinelli-Cahill watches the scenes and directs: “Be somewhat
covered. I want people to go, ‘Who are they, where are they
coming from?’”

Mancinelli-Cahill does a little cha-cha in her chair trying
to keep the pace up in a scene between the Student and the
Au Pair—“What happens if you collapse the scene?”—as scene
flows into scene, coupling into coupling, position into position.
The merely voyeuristic will get their money’s worth from The
Blue Room, but the play and this production aim for much
more.

Each character receives individual work: “I kept hearing my
Actress,” Landecker worries and Mancinelli-Cahill reassures
her that the Model is distinct from the Actress. “He’s trying
to do this impotence thing, but I don’t think it’s working,”
and the director agrees without laughing. During a 10-minute
break, she rhapsodizes: “It’s so intense, 10 scenes, 20 characters,
creating history, what kind of sex they’re having. . . . ”
Then she returns to mapping the physical. “Dan, you’re getting
it, then feel the outline of her all the way down. I love
it when you do that.” All that’s needed are the cigarettes
and the post-coital chat. As someone once said to me, “Maggie
gives good quote, as all good directors do.”